What Hosting Taught a CEO That Guesting Never Did

SPEAKER_01 0:00

When you are a guest on a podcast, they learn about you. When you are the actual host of a podcast, you learn about yourself. You know, I can go on as a guest to 100 podcasts and I hear myself talk about what I already know, I believe, over and over again.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

What was a surprising thing that you learned about? Learned about business, or even maybe just learned about yourself. So, Christopher Swing. He's the CEO of Vantage, a surgery company in Illinois where he's worked his way up from CFO and through a sale to private equity. He also consults, teaches, and hosts the podcast Faithful, a show where he makes his faith in business leadership.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

I have a small mind. I'm an average guy from a small community in the middle of Illinois. And there are some really amazing people that do this really well. You really learn through perspective about yourself and you also learn some of the gaps. There are absolutely people out there that are better at what we need to do than we are. And if we want to really grow and evolve into the next level of who we see ourselves to be, we've got to be willing to ask some of those hard questions. I'm just intrigued, really, more than anything else, that there's something that I'm missing, you know, whether that be I'm Kenny, and this is the Founder Podcast Lab.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

So, Chris, you run a company, you consult, you teach. How does Faithful, your podcast, fit into all of that?

SPEAKER_01 1:35

You know, I think it's like the thread that kind of weaves all the pieces of the puzzle together. Um, I don't think it's holding up any of them, but I think it's, you know, just connecting uh and and helping to introduce me to people as I'm as I'm learning about them in different uh avenues of life. I just love to, you know, be out there and be transparent with who I am and kind of what's important to me. And what I found is that, you know, as I join a board or as I, you know, go to a fundraiser, people will seek me out because they know the background of me. And that's kind of unique. Um I don't know that it necessarily changes uh, you know, how I do things, and I don't think it necessarily impacts, you know, uh when I think about like my work or or any of the consulting that I do. You know, I like to think that if somebody is trying to make a decision as to whether or not they want to partner with my organizations or not, that that weighs into it, good or bad, because that's who I am, and it's who I am, you know, no matter who you are. And so I think that's probably the that's kind of how I look at faithful per se and and how it intertwines with with all the different things that I do.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

So it's a reflection of you and the things that you do, and it may not be a thing that kind of holds up anything like your business or consulting or anything like that, but it's kind of showing who you are in your brand and it attracts those specific types of people. Um, regardless of the podcast, you move that way, and that has attracted a specific type of people, but that's kind of an extension of that. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Yeah, exactly. It's the it's the life that I live every day, and it's kind of who who we want to be as an organization, no matter what organization that I participate with. I do think it helps some of those organizations to figure out that I don't fit with what they're trying to do, or I do fit with what they're trying to do. You know, I I got to meet some guys doing some amazing work for churches, and I'm pretty sure that my podcast caused them to ask me to come to a meeting to see what it is that they're trying to do. And it's because what they're trying to do fits, you know, with a lot of what I talk about, which is, you know, even within a church, how do you lead a church like a church should be led? And it's not as easy as people think it might be. Uh, you know, you assume that the things that go on in church meetings are all reflective of Christ and servant leadership and things like that. And sadly as it is, that's not always the case. And so I think it just uh it's it's basically like a a forward declaration of you know who I am every day.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

That makes sense. Forward declaration of who you are every day, it kind of attracts certain type of people, pushes away a certain other type of people. That makes sense. Just for those who skip forward, maybe because I do explain, but what is the podcast? What is its purpose? Just your own general explanation of it.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

So it's a it's a uh a love of trying to understand how people with faith are impacted by their faith and how they run their organizations. Because, you know, like for instance, if you uh you know, you want to treat people the way that they should be treated, that like what Jesus taught us to do. And so what does that mean as someone who holds a lot of information that a person doesn't need to know? Like, how do you handle some of those situations where you know, if in fact that person knew that information, they would not be okay with it. Not because it's, you know, something that's inappropriate or something that's uh, you know, unimportant, but it it could be extremely important in the sense that it's a burden that you share. So, like for instance, let's say you have multiple millions of dollars worth of debt. Um, you know, a faith, a faith-based background would say, well, how do you not tell somebody that that exists and not mislead them? And so I think, you know, being willing to say, look, you know, there's still an appropriate amount of information provided based upon where you're at in the organization. And that's still okay. It's not misleading someone. You don't go to, like, let's say that all of a sudden we had a bad month. Let's say we lost $100,000. Like, we're not gonna go to our entry-level staff and say, oh my gosh, bad, bad deal. Like, we just lost $100,000 because they're going, like, that's more than my salary for two years. Like, I don't, I don't want, you know, I don't, I can't reconcile what that and you did this in a month. Like, holy cow, how did you miss the mark so far? Like, and I think having some of those transparent conversations amongst uh faithful people to say, you know, we still have to provide an appropriate level of information for the people that work for us, but you know, in essence, by being completely transparent, we would burden these people with burdens that we've trained ourselves how to carry, but that they couldn't. And they also don't understand the relationship. Like, you know, let's say, for instance, you're talking about scaling your sales team, and you're gonna invest, let's say, $2.5 million over the next six months in order to really scale that team. Well, you're not gonna make any money probably during those five or six months. And so without context, like you have to be really careful not to mislead people uh with being transparent, right? And so I think that's the kinds of conversations that I really like to have and and just have the discussion and say, you know, how do you handle this, business owner? How do you navigate some of these things that, you know, a person would say, well, you're not a very faithful person if you're not doing this, this, and this. And it's like, you know, well, I think we have to be a little bit cautious to say that person who comes to work every day and clocks in and expects to get paid for it, like they aren't prepared to bear a lot of the burdens that a lot of us that have been through some crazy times, like speaking of managing COVID or whatever, um, would have. So, so that's really what it's about. And, you know, sometimes I'm I'm sure I'm better than others, and sometimes we have really good conversations, and sometimes, you know, uh it is less face faith book focused, I would say. But in essence, there's there's nothing that you couldn't sit around with your child and listen to. And I think that's the other part of it is, you know, really just bringing people together to start having conversations around what it is that we believe or what it is that they see as being important when they operate a business with their faith.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Aaron Powell To me, what I'm hearing is that it's generally it's about your values as a person and in the faith and making sure those values are integrated with how you move through life, with how you move through your business and the people you interact with having similar values, especially Yeah, and I think an extension of that too is you know, when we profess our faith to a wide audience, it provides some level of accountability, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:54

There's a lot of people that are looking for us to do the right thing. Um or maybe they're looking for us to do the wrong thing. But I think that's the part that helps to hold me accountable to say, you know, I'm I'm not just a Christian on Sunday. I'm a Christian every day of the week. And that means some things that aren't as comfortable as others. Um, but it it definitely focuses me on, you know, how we're gonna treat our employees, how we're gonna value people, no matter, you know, where they come from or what language that they speak. Um, there's just a lot of things that get baked into that. And I think it's, you know, it's it's good to be out there. I think it's good for people to stand for something. And, you know, I faith is super important to me. Um, like I said in the early on part of this conversation, I I don't know that it's getting me a lot of business, and I don't think people are searching for, you know, faith-based uh surgical service companies in in the US and calling me. But hey, if that's important to you, I'd love to talk to you about it too.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Right, right. Before we started recording, I remember hearing you talk about how when you're looking for people you work with, that you're looking for people who are in the faith and have those similar values. Can you explain more of that?

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Well, I think if you want your values to reach all the way throughout your organization, you need to find champions that believe what you believe. And and we have these conversations internally, obviously, I'm sure, as you can imagine. Um, you know, I don't drill my team to, and I I wouldn't not hire the best person, assuming that they were kind and took care of our employees like we wanted to, that didn't have the faith. But at the same time, like I think it's really important that you do have a group of people in your organization that are focused on, you know, understanding clearly. Obviously, if you have the faith, you would understand what those principles are. But I want people that know how to handle our team members and our business decisions without having to come to me. And and I think that's the other thing that this kind of helps. It's it's kind of like another vision or mission of your organization. It's like do what's right, you know, like period. Hard stop, even when it's hard. Yeah, you know, and I think that's where um it it streamlines a lot of decisions because it's like, well, if that's what you need to do to to make it right, then that's what you need to do. Like it's that simple. And uh, and so I think for me it's it's um it comes down to you can you can absolutely build a similar culture without faith-based people if you find the right people. But in general, you know, if I had to choose between two equally valuable candidates, one with faith and one without. Um, first of all, I probably don't know what their faith is because that's not something that we talk about in those conversations. But if I believed one to have faith and the other one to not have faith, I'd probably pick the one that does have the faith. And I I think it's, you know, that's probably one of my investors right now are saying, well, that's kind of short-sighted of you. Um, and maybe so, but uh, but it's natural, I think, for us to want to be around people who are like us.

unknown 13:39

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Because we understand them, like we know what they're going through and some of the struggles um and how they'll deal with things when they arise.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

So, regardless if they have faith or not, it you are looking at their values once again. Absolutely. At the end of the day, you you know, if you had to pick between similar values, similar valuable candidates, you choose the one who has faith, but you're not looking into that that deeply. You're just looking at their character in general.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Is it relatable to that's how I would define it is character over skills? Because we can teach somebody skills, you can't teach somebody character. And it doesn't mean that if they don't have it, that you shouldn't invest in those people. I absolutely think the opposite. But I would much rather try to teach somebody skills than somebody character with the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

What inspired you to make it in the first place? What why one day you're like, you know what? Podcast that puts faith and business together. We need to make that. What what came of what how did you get inspired to do that?

SPEAKER_01 14:46

I like to do difficult things for some reason. I don't know. It's it's like it was this motivation for something, something was going on in my faith walk and dealing with some uh church business and things like that. And I was like, I don't know if we were reading the right book or or what came across me, my my desk, but I was like, you know, maybe it's time to to show the world, you know, what is important to me. And this seemed like a really good avenue to do it. And and the the other thing is, is like our faith comes under so much fire in business, and there's so many people that are working so hard to try to make things so good for their team members, you know. Um am I perfect? Absolutely not, but I do really feel like I would pick doing something for one of my team members over doing it for myself, and I I do it all the time. Um and so I kind of wanted to get it out there and let people see, because I think so often they they think that what they see in Facebook and all these crazy places and and the the uh you know just the negativity around having faith, it it's it's not real. Like it's not in my world, it's not real. And I think I do think there are a lot of people that see us um sinning or doing something that is inappropriate, and they get really, you know, distracted by that, and they say, Well, uh, he's a Christian, like I can't believe he did something wrong. Like when my car is pulled over on the side of the road because I was speeding or something. And and it's like, yeah, you know, I I do make mistakes just like everybody else, but the intention to to do the right thing is there. And um, and I think there are, like I said, I think there are secular people that you know have those same great and attention, you know, intentions. And so it's not, I don't want to take anything away from them, but my point is that you can be in the faith and you can run a business and you can, you know, fulfill, you know, your commitments to to Christ and and to our God.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

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SPEAKER_01 18:25

I just I think I wanted to tell people that hey, it's okay to have faith and be a CEO. Because I think so many, I think there are probably a lot of them out there. You know, I think that uh because of the my truth, your truth kind of thing, there's a whole lot of people that are like, it's not really necessary for me to be quote unquote a Christian to be a CEO. And so therefore, I'm just gonna kind of live that life on Sunday, and then I'm gonna go to work and uh I'm gonna live, you know, just a normal quote unquote secular life at work or a non non-disclosure, nondescript life at work, whatever. But it's like, I don't think you should be afraid to be a Christian and to be a CEO or to be a Christian and to be a leader of a business of any sort. And so my hope is is that over time that that frees people to say, you know what? Like, I don't have to hide this part of my life. And and the cool part is, is like, they're probably operating just fine, but it kind of gets back to that Matthew 28 thing that I was telling you before. It's like sometimes you gotta just make the statement, you know, like, hey, you know, I don't know if Christ is for you, but it is for me. And this is what my story looks like. And uh, and my life is far from perfect, but I but I still am super appreciative of everything that was done for me.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

So it's okay to be a Christian and a CEO. That's what you're putting out there, and you're giving your worldview, your values, as well as about how to run through business. That's pretty accurate. With that, who do you say is like the perfect ideal?

SPEAKER_01 20:19

I think it's a combination of the you know entrepreneur that absolutely has nothing at risk to to being a faithful leader of their business. I think it's uh it's also a combination of uh, you know, Fortune 1000 or Fortune 5000 CEO, whatever you want to, you know. Obviously, it's probably not a Fortune 100 CEO. They have PR departments that decide what whether or not they can sneeze on the camera. Um, but when you get a little bit lower than that, you know, those there's a lot less directive uh from their uh PR departments. Um, I think it's the the uh closely held company CEO, uh the family business CEO, uh those people that that are living this life and that are operating their business appropriately in the way that we we think that Christ would expect us to operate our business, had he been walking alongside, you know, that's kind of hard to think about, right? Because I still go back to I'm thankful to live after Christ, where I have his word, because for me that's so valuable. Uh, you know, some people would say, oh no, I would pick to live with Christ. I'm not sure that that not seeing the interconnection of the Old Testament through the New Testament, just having one per person's faith confession and and whatever would have mattered to me at the time. Now, granted, if he if I was one of the 500 where he, you know, came out of the grave and showed Me, his hands and his side, and and I could clearly see that you know he had risen. Um, that's a little different. But yeah, let's be honest, that's a small portion of the population at that time, right? And almost everybody that he showed himself to were believers uh that are documented. I'm sure there were tons of non-believers, just to prove that, hey, this isn't some fallacy created by a few guys. But um, but yeah, so I I mean I just I think it's it's those people that especially the ones that have nothing to lose, because I think that's where this kind of starts to collect some, you know, some snow, if you want to think about it as a snowball effect. And then more and more people start to talk about it. And I'll be the first to tell you, like, because of our faith, like, I don't care, you know, what country you come from, I don't care what what language you spoke as a child or or even today, like you have, you are respected as much as a Christian is within this organization. And I've been challenged by some crazy things, you know, through that, uh as an employer. And, you know, I just I take it in in into my study and I pray about it, and I'm like, I know exactly how I deal with this. This is super easy. Like, but in those, in those moments, it can really challenge you, you know, because it's it's easy to to to sin, to, to have a different perspective than than what we would do if Jesus was standing right beside us when we're making some of these decisions.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

Be different if Jesus was sitting right beside us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

I'm pretty sure I would be under my desk, but that's just me, you know. Like as someone who's spent a lot of time really studying, and and you know, I even took a almost two-year class on how to preach uh from uh a PhD, you know, from the master seminary in my church. Uh, I was super appreciative for that because I learned so much. But I it makes me realize how small I really am in the whole scheme of things. Um, and so, you know, I think those are those are things that are good and helpful though for us to really have some perspective. And and uh, you know, I I don't know. I I am positive that there are things that I I am disappointing Christ in, but you know, I try my best every day to to represent him well.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

So we can do. I remember you mentioning you had like a list of like if I heard you correctly, it was like people you wanted to have on the podcast or connect with. Was that true? That's correct, yeah. That's first of all, that's a big list. Like you made a big list. Uh with those people, what's like what's your inspiration to have like those people on the podcast? Why exactly would you want them on the podcast?

SPEAKER_01 25:00

So let me just say this when you are a guest on a podcast, they learn about you. When you are the actual host of a podcast, you learn about yourself. And I think that's one of those things, right? Like, because you know, I can go on as a guest to 100 podcasts and I hear myself talk about what I already know, I believe, over and over again. But when you bring those people into your world and you open yourself up to their perspective of your world, because I mean, I'm trying to operate that way, right? You really learn through perspective about yourself, and you also learn some of the gaps. And I think that's part of how I picked a lot of those people was I went through and I I made a list of you know, like 25 people, and then I used AI to say, hey, if you know, if these people were interesting to me, what people do I not even think about or know about? And and who should I put on this list? And it came up with like 180 or 190. And I was like, there's got, I mean, there's 300 million people in this country like for crying out loud, there's gotta be more than this. Sure. And so then I pressed it harder and and I just kept you know growing the the list and it started asking me questions and things like that. Um, but my thought, my thought was is like, you know, as you think about uh, you know, your faith walk, and I think about how I operate the business, uh, and and the fact that I'll have another business when this one is, you know, no longer my business or whatever. Um, or I've or I've moved on to something else, you know, I just value spiritual men's perspective of how they look at and what's important to them and how they interact with their team and how they motivate their team and how they lead their team and how they focus on their team. And and and it's not so much like this isn't a I don't feel like I owe anybody anything. I don't feel like I'm trying to do this to uh you know, to better the world, though I I do think that there's some potential that could come from that. That's it wasn't it wasn't the vision binded, it was really about, you know, I have a small mind. I'm an average guy from a small community in the middle of Illinois, and there are some really amazing people that do this really well. And what can I learn from them like having a conversation with them? And I'm just I'm just intrigued, really, more than anything else, that there's something that I'm missing, you know, whether that be um, you know, how I operate my day or you know what I do when I'm out interacting with my staff. You know, like for instance, I was at a uh breakfast and the staff that I was meeting with knew that I was Christian, and and somebody goes, you know, would you mind praying for us? And it's like those moments that, you know, of course I would love to pray for you. Like I would love nothing more than to do that. Now, am I gonna do that if I'm not invited to do that? No. You know, I I don't I don't want to make I I I I feel strongly that the last thing that I want to do is alienate the one person that may not be faith-backed. So if people don't ask for that of me, you know, that's not something that I do. Now, if I go out to lunch with one of my friends, of course we pray for each other. But uh in a business sense, it's a little bit different. But it was the first time it's happened to me. You know, I've been the leader of this organization since 2012. And yes, when I'm with my partners, we we're both we're all faith-backed, and actually most of my administrative team as well. And so that's different. But when you start to expand and you have some lower level of staff where, you know, I don't know each and every one of them, but I still, you know, I'm super blessed to have the opportunities like that every once in a while. And I do think that stuff comes from being out there and being transparent and it being searchable. Um, so yeah, so I mean it's just little instances like that, but it but I think more than anything, it goes back to the fact that I really like this idea of learning. I'm just a lifelong learner. It doesn't matter, matter what it's about, whether it's our faith or uh, you know, space travel or uh airplanes or I mean, just pick it. It's golf. I mean, some of the dumbest things. My wife is like just shakes her head at some of the things that I like to research. Um, but you know, it's it's just part of the joy of understanding how things work, I think.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

What it's sounding like to me is that your podcast, Faithful, is serving as in a way kind of like a laboratory. Yeah, kind of. So similar to how I treat my podcasts, right now it's you know, it's called the Founder Podcast Lab, where I'm learning from founders, operators, how they use their business, I mean how they use their podcasts to create business outcomes. I'm honestly just taking in information, trying to apply information, connecting with like-minded individuals. It seems to me with your podcast, that is the main goal. Like you're trying to connect with like-minded individuals, people of faith in business, and learn about business from them and the way they think about it, getting the and getting out there that this is a thing that CEOs can also be of the faith and they can talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. Yeah, I really love the learning element of it. I mean, I do think probably more than anything else, that that was really what drove it to begin with. And the other part of it was at the time when I was starting it, you know, my lead pastor, uh Ian, was doing some of the the uh uh podcast with me. And I just love spending time with people who have a ton of knowledge about something that's important to me. And so, you know, we've traveled to Africa multiple times together. Uh, he just went with us to the Dominican Republic as kind of a you know, uh, a Hail Mary trip. It had been, I think, 2015 since I'd been uh in country for a mission trip. Now, my wife sits on the board of directors for the mission, so we've been there multiple times for board meetings and things like that. But but a true mission trip. And then it just so happened, you know, coincidentally, of course, that uh I was in charge of that trip and I scheduled it over my 20th anniversary and we renewed our vows on the beach right there. And so it was just like those are the fun things that you get to do with your friends, you know, and and and you know, part of that is just enjoying being around people who uh he's the one that has the PhD, by the way, that uh taught the the teaching class. And so, you know, you start to absorb some of this stuff and you go, man, I've learned more in like six months than I've learned in the last 43 years about my faith. There's something about this, like we need to be around these people because you know, it doesn't mean that I I want to agree with everything that is in the Bible, but the reality is that the more that I understand, you know, how the doctrines work and how they work together, and you start to throw out out one and the the other pieces that fall apart, it's like, okay, well, maybe I don't love it, but that doesn't make it any less true. And so, you know, having those people around you to say, okay, so basically what you're saying is if I jump and uh I fall on the ground, that you know, nothing will happen. Or or if I jump and I I'll just continue to float because I believe it. And and I'm like, yeah, that's basically what I'm saying, and it doesn't really make a lot of sense. And so having having those people around you to hold you accountable for your knowledge and and to provide lots of knowledge when you need it, it's it's a lot of fun, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

The podcast is kind of on hiatus, you hit season one. Yes. What would make season two better than season one and what needs to happen for season two to come around?

SPEAKER_01 34:09

So I think a couple things that I I learned after I kind of was worn down by the you know, the continuous trudge to keep enough guests and getting through the production and all that stuff because I was doing it all myself. Is that first of all, season two is gonna have a definitive time frame, you know, because I I didn't go into it knowing what season one was gonna look like, and so I I didn't know when I'd finished, and I don't know that I really had finished when I had finished, but it was just a logical pause point. So I think really understanding what it is, uh, you know, that from a time frame perspective, um, and then committing to bringing uh you know production staff and scheduling staff and things like that into it to where you know I don't have to worry about, okay, this person canceled on me, so now what am I gonna do for this week's podcast? Um and really doing a better job of getting a kind of a runway set up before I start to release the the uh the podcast. Because, you know, the people that I'm trying to interact with are CEOs and you know, business owners, and and I know how fast my situation can shift. And it's like I, you know, a few months ago we had an issue in Colorado, and I just dropped everything, you know, everything was dropped, and it's like we're shifting to Colorado and we're gonna figure this out until it's done, and then we'll we'll come back when it's when it's resolved. And so I I completely understand people's need to be able to flex when when something comes up, but because of that, like I need to have runway and I need to have planned and and you know some some points during that first uh season, I had really good runway, and we had done a lot of uh you know pre-planned meetings and and the production was done and it was fine, but then at other points in time, you know, stuff would happen on my side, or you know, or or we would be talking with somebody, they're like, Yeah, I'm interested, but I can't quite do it yet. And so you'd you know, kind of keep filling in this gap. And at some point it's like, okay, I I still have to run a business, sit on at least uh two boards, you know, that are uh for-profit, and then I have you know, three or four uh non-for-profit boards that and and I don't do anything halfway. So most of the time when I'm on a board, whether it's at the beginning or at the end, I'm eventually the president. And so it's like it just takes a lot of time. And and at some point, you know, something that's uh a fun, uh exciting, you know, new adventure, it it becomes like work. And without having a team of people to help support me in that, it's kind of like okay, you know, I've got this multi, multi-million dollar business that I really need to be focused on. Um, and I'm taking time away from it to do something that I think most of my partners would probably say is uh not significantly impacting that organization. And they didn't, you know, when they bought our business uh on the private equity side and then uh ultimately hired me eventually to run it, they didn't do that with the idea that I was gonna be part-time CEO. And so I think that's the other piece of this is I I need the support staff. I wanna I I want to have a very uh focused uh mission behind season two. It's gonna be a uh limited time frame and um and then we'll probably be, I want to say probably like 30 or 40 percent of it will be recorded before we start releasing the actual um weekly podcast.

SPEAKER_00 38:35

So so you need uh just generally more organization and some more runway.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

Yeah, I I'm the visionary guy, you know. If you think about EOS, like the execution, um, I can do that, but it takes away from my creativity and being able to really visualize where we're going. And so I I just being more in tune with that, you know, as I get older, it's like, okay, yeah, this is how this is gonna go. And um, and to be honest, like I have pretty high expectations of myself as well as my team. And so, you know, I don't want to do it just to do it. I want to do it the right way. And I want people to be, you know, happy with the outcome of it and and be proud of not only the the things that I'm doing, but the people who are coming on and that they can share, you know, the idea behind it is that they can turn around and share this podcast, even if they don't, you know, start a podcast on their own or start, you know, uh sending out press releases saying that they're a Christian, they could at least circulate this to some of the people internally and say, you know, this is this was really fun. You know, you guys should try this sometime or something and send it out so they can review it.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

Circling back to kind of the core of the podcast Faithful and how you're using it as creating examples of CEO business owners who are in the faith, as well as being able to connect with those people and learn from them. I'm curious, from season one, what was a surprising thing that you learned about, learned about business, or even maybe just learned about yourself creating that and having those guests on.

SPEAKER_01 40:27

So I think back um a couple of things that I learned about um, and it wasn't the intention of either one of the podcasts, but you know, when we sold, uh I was the president and CEO of Vantage. I owned about 40% of it. And you know, we we assumed until like three weeks before we closed that I was gonna be the CEO. And then all of a sudden, at the last minute, the private equity firm said, Oh, we've hired a CEO. It just happens to be this consultant that's been helping do the work. And um, and that was a that was a difficult thing for us to figure out how to deal with because we were both, you know, both families, um, the founding family and myself, we're both depositing, you know, huge checks and trying to figure out is uh is this something that we want to fight or is this something we just want to forget about? And I can tell you now, after trying to recover from a lot of bad decisions that were made when they did bring that CEO in for the first couple of years, uh, it's a whole lot easier to spend money than it is to save it. And that's what we've done, you know, is he came in and basically spent money in every aspect of our business except for um except for sales, which is where usually you spend a lot of money because you want your business to grow. So we were having some top line decline, and at the same time, we were exponentially growing almost every expense within the organization. So it was it was a crash course with disaster to say the least. Um, it was really interesting to hear my partner say that that was something that she wished she had done differently. And we talked about that, you know, it's it's not like uh and I'm not I don't think I'm sharing anything that's not out there already, but um yeah, it was a very interesting thing to hear her say because we'd agreed. Like I thought that was, you know, to me, that was something that we settled on. And, you know, once I make a commitment to a decision, like that's there were times, you know, that I I'm sure I would have thought, you know, this ding dong is probably not helping us to throw this thing into something that's valuable. And and I rolled almost half of my equity into the new business. So so he was negatively impacting the value that we were supposed to be creating. Uh it was just interesting to hear her and to think about the fact that she had carried that with her, you know, for over a year after we had closed, but she never expressed that to me. And I think part of it was, you know, we had decided it and so we had moved on. The other thing that I thought was really interesting, um, and it was in a conversation that I had with Joe Dively, and it's not as much faith-oriented as it is business-oriented, but it was really interesting for me to hear him talk about the fact that he is a NASDAQ listed CEO, and he's had one person ask him to be a mentor. That really set me back. And and it it did for multitudes of things, because I think sometimes some of the people that Are my mentors? I don't really call it that. We just have breakfast or we get together for a coffee or uh or whatever. But it it really set me back. And he goes, you know, I had this girl ask me at random, you know, is this something you'd be willing to do for me? And he's like, I'm assuming that most people think there's people like constantly calling us, you know, asking us to do these things. And so they never ask. But nobody ever asks. And so, you know, of course, he invested time in this person, and he's very connected in our university that we both graduated from. He was the, you know, one of the board of trustees multiple times, huge on the foundation board and things like that. So it's just fun for me to hear that. And then it kind of made me think like, should I be, I mean, should I do I need to formally ask some of these people to be my mentor? And I I eventually decided on no because I thought that would be too weird at the point in time where I was at with them. But I think the point that he was trying to make is there are people who want to see us succeed. And there are absolutely people out there that are better at what we need to do than we are. And if we want to really grow and evolve into the next level of who we see ourselves to be, we've got to be willing to ask some of those hard questions. And it was very eye-opening to me. And I and I've heard from lots of people, that was the one thing that I've heard from lots of people was oh my gosh, like, who would have thought that this person who is very publicly visible in multiple aspects of his life um would have never asked to have been a mentor. And so to me, what that tells me is there's a whole lot of people that are going at this alone. And uh you don't have to. I I think so often, you know, we think about people throwing throwing dirt. Um, you know, and what I mean by that is like they, you know, challenge us or question us on our decisions or whatever. But um, and I don't know, I don't think this was on one of the podcasts that I recorded, but one of the guys along the way said, you know, I've never had anyone make a suggestion that was better than me that that I had done something, you know, incorrectly, or that they felt like, you know, that I wasn't fulfilling, you know, my expectations for myself. It's always the people beneath me that were doing that. And I thought back and I was like, you know, um so true. Like so often we get in our minds that these people are gonna judge us. But you know, I think about YPO and and you know, I've had the opportunity to meet and interact with, I don't know, six or seven different billionaires now. And like have halfway decent conversations with them. And never one of them, never did one of them say, Oh, you're not a billionaire, or like, I don't, you know, I I can't believe that you guys can't figure this out or suggest in any way that we're less than them. Um, that's from the people who um have not attained any level of success and they're just throwing shade across the across the board, in my opinion. And and I think that's what it it really opened my eyes to is you know, okay, throw yourself out there. Let's say one of them judges you. Who cares? Like, you know, if you can't have enough self-confidence to overcome something like that, then then you don't deserve to be in the role that you're in or or doing what you're doing. And so, um, so I think those are the two things. And and I know those weren't faith-oriented things necessarily, but just two things that really, you know, as I think back uh through those different podcast episodes, and then the the other piece of it that I'll I'll just say is that um there's something different about your relationship after you do research about someone and you ask them meaningful thought-provoking questions that you know maybe doesn't change their perspective of themselves, but provides, you know, maybe some uh you know interconnection uh or clarity around you know how this aspect of their life affects another one. I'm just amazed. Oh, the other one that I I forgot about was, you know, one of uh the guys that I interviewed is from St. Louis and and um and uh you know has a debilitating disease. And you know, he talked to me about having personal family values and how they use those to help their kids pick who their friends were. And I thought, man, you know, I'm a dummy. Like I do this every day for my business, and I've never thought about that. And to be honest, I came home and I was like bent on getting that done, and I still haven't done it, but it's just one of those things I I I fully intend to at some point, and actually, until that till you asked me that question, I hadn't thought about it for a while. Um, but you know, just amazing people that have really amazing ideas and I think can help us all to to grow and evolve.

SPEAKER_00 49:48

With those three points, it sounds to me that the podcast is certainly doing its job so far, it's giving you a lot to reflect on, to learn from, and giving those examples into podcast forum for people to hear so they can learn those same things potentially. Would you say that it's successful in that regard for you?

unknown 50:09

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:10

I mean, to be honest though, like I'm such a relational person. Like the fact that you took the time to do the work behind the scenes to know enough about me to ask me effective, meaningful questions, like to me, that's that just does something for me to say, hey, why am I so important to this person that they would take the time to do the research? Because I mean, we, you know, we we interacted on a on a platform that's fully intended to do this, right? To connect people. And there are times where, you know, as well as I do, you get onto these podcasts and they ask you the same questions that you've answered 15 times, and all they have to do is search your name and they could have those, you know, questions because I've done enough podcasts now that they could go through and they'd be like, I like the answer to that question. I don't really like the answer to that question. Well, he says the exact same thing over and over and over again for that question, you know, and pick through it, but that's not what you did. You went out and you're like, okay, how do I build something meaningful where you know, where I get a very different perspective from this person? You know, why do you do that? I don't know. But I I love these types of conversations because I can talk about all my business philosophies, I can talk about all my leadership philosophies, I can talk about all the crazy experiences that I have, whether that be, you know, uh meeting and interviewing the director of the secret service, or you know, meeting a multi-billionaire, or you know, getting uh asking questions about somebody who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, what am I missing? Like, what do you see in me? So the reason that I'm in YPO is this uh lady that used to be from the area that now lives in Nashville. I I went and stayed at her house one day, and she's like, You can't leave here until you tell me that you're gonna try to join and stay in YPO for at least one year. That's all I ask. You can do it for one year, and if you don't want to do it anymore, then you can leave. Yeah, since then I've been on the board for seven years. I'm the chair-elect of the organization, and I'm right now in the process of developing the education year. Well, I've already developed it, I'm executing our education year with these amazing people and getting amazing experiences. And it's like, you know, why did I happen to be there that day? And why did she decide that YPO was the one thing she was going to focus on? I have no idea. But I'm getting ready to do an event with her in Naples in January, and you know, I think there's like three or four billionaires that will be there as part of this event. And it's like, those are the you know, you if you invest in people and you invest in these relationships, it's just amazing to me where that goes. And and for me, it's not even really the outcome of it so much as the it's not about the destination, it's about the process, it's about the the you know, it's it's about what's happening right now. And you know, so to me, I think that my podcast was great. I learned a lot of stuff from it. I'm sure that there are, you know, thousands of people that would listen to my podcast and be like, eh, it's fine.

SPEAKER_00 53:40

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 53:41

And I'm sure that there would be 10 or 15 people that listen to every one of those episodes and be like, wow, wow, wow. Um, but it did it did what I needed it to do. It allowed me to have a reason sometimes to get together with some of my own friends, you know, just to take the time and say, Oh, a perfect example is like Joe Dively, the the NASDAQ CEO. His mom was my favorite substitute teacher in high school. And we connected the dots of this in the middle of this podcast, you know, and it's like you almost want to hit pause and say, okay, let's have a conversation about this. And so then we got through the rest of the podcast, and then I could catch up on, you know, what that meant to me and and why how something so simple as that can be so meaningful. And I can tell you, I remember the day she walked into the classroom, and four of us had sat down at this, you know, four-sided table, and and she had playing cards out, and we had started, you know, dealing poker to each other. And she's like, You mean to tell me that you're gonna come to my class and you're not gonna let me play with my cards? And it was just it was just so her, you know, like it was so awesome. She's 70 years old at this time, you know, we're 18-year-olds, and you know, we were on top of the world, and she's like, No, no, no, no, no, no. This is my class, and those are my cards, like, get out of the way, you know? Uh, and and just having those experiences and learning how to interact and and be joy-filled, you know, in in just about every different situation is uh, I think that's what some of those experiences provide me.

SPEAKER_00 55:27

That being said, is there anything that you wanted to mention that we haven't talked about in this conversation yet?

SPEAKER_01 55:34

No, I think you know, I'm super like I said, I'm just appreciative of you know the work that you did and the questions that you asked. I'm sure that there are a million different questions that are going through your mind that sure you didn't ask. And maybe those would have been great answers, and maybe they wouldn't have been. I don't I don't know, but uh I just enjoyed the time and um appreciate the the thoughtfulness.

SPEAKER_00 56:03

Well, I appreciate your appreciation, I guess. Final question. Yeah, 60 seconds or less for a founder or CEO who is listening to this right now, and they want to make sure they are actually learning and growing from their podcast that they put out. What's the one thing they should do going into the next episode to make that more possible?

SPEAKER_01 56:35

I think the biggest thing is just dumb phone it in. You know, take the time. If you if you really want to have amazing people on your podcast, you have to engage them at a level that the average podcast is not going to. And it it doesn't take a lot, like you can do it in short order, but people know and they see it. Like your audience knows when you show up and ask the person the same question. There will be some people that will watch this podcast because it's me. And if you had asked me the same question that everybody else did, they would have been like, well, he asked the same questions. But when you do something that's thought-provoking, all of a sudden they go, you know, I'm not even a podcaster, but I really like this guy. I really like his approach. I like that he wants his guests to not only feel comfortable, but also to have to think and to think about things in ways that maybe they hadn't otherwise thought about. Um, and then I I would always just challenge you to use it as an opportunity to get across some key attribute that, you know, whatever success looks like from your guest perspective, um, because I think so often we, and and I was guilty of this, completely guilty of this, is that I had such a visual visal visualization of what I wanted to accomplish that sometimes I didn't I didn't think about what success looked like to my guest. And it's not that that's that important, but I think what's important is your audience's perspective of your uh thoughtfulness to to the person that you're having the conversation with. Because I think in this day and age, you know, there's there's too many podcasts out there that are using AI to generate random, you know, thoughtless questions. I mean, every one of these are transcripted, right? And I know I I went over your 60 seconds, sorry, but uh every one of these are transcripted. And so what happens is you go out into chat and you're like, hey, I'm gonna interview Chris Swing, and it's gonna be like, okay, well, here's the 100 questions that he's been asked, and here's the ones that are the best answers, or here's the ones that are focused on what your audience wants. And uh, you know, I I always just tell people uh I I would always encourage people to think about what success looks like. And the one thing that I usually leave people with is um I think one of the most biggest, one of the biggest misconceptions around personal success today is consumption. And that is that we value success based on a person's consumption. And let me just tell you that if you've whether you earn it or you've accumulated significant amounts of wealth, you can't have wealth and consume. It's it's one or the other. Now, granted, you're at Jeff Bezos, you can consume all day long. They can't spend enough money in order to spend it down. But for the rest of us that are average people, the choice is either consume or to have wealth. And and I think you know, if you read like the millionaire next door, is a great uh way to dive into that. And so I I encourage people to really think about how they evaluate success. And I think so often consumerism is the way we evaluate success, and it's it couldn't be further from the reality, and so that I think that's probably the most important thing from a podcaster's perspective.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:31

If I were to be your mentor as a podcaster, that's what I would tell you is is to understand, you know, the thing that that guest thinks is valuable to their audience globally, give them that importance. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:52

That's that's the way I see it. Because I I think the difference today is you know, I mean, you could be different and like have a crazy podcast or something. I'm not saying that. Um, and that could be just as fun as some of these serious ones, I'm guessing. I I don't podcast for fiction or whatever, but you know, I mean, there I'm sure there are out there. But I think if you're if you're looking to have a podcast that really connects with people, understanding that there are people that follow your guest is important to understand. And that if you can get across, you know, what's important to them, you may collect that audience. And I think that's you know, that's part of how this works, right? Is like I come on to your podcast, all of a sudden people are Googling me. Um, not that I think that highly of myself, but let's just say that they're thinking about doing business with one of my businesses, and they Google me and they come across to your podcast. Like, I would be honored for them to listen to this podcast because it was really intentional, it was really thought-provoking. I think we have good content here that the average person, even if they're not trying to start a podcast or trying to help evolve their podcast, would say, Oh, that was that was cool, like a unique creative experience between two people that you know appreciate good quality. And and I think that's what helps you to really start to grow an audience. And and sometimes that's the stuff that you know, you don't have to go viral for the wrong things, like you can go viral for the right things.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:38

Chris, highly appreciate you being on the show today and answering all these questions and really deep, deep diving into them. Um, thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:49

Yeah, thanks for having me. I mean, this is this is what I live for. I love to do these types of things. So appreciate your thoughtfulness, and I'm sure your audience, you know, gets to see it day in and day out because I'm sure you do it all the time. But it was cool to experience it.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:05

That being said, this has been the Founder Podcast Lab. See you in the next episode.